Will a Close Election Put Electoral College on the Chopping Block? (Part 1 of 3)

On Saturday, October 27, an ABC News article asked, “Would Electoral Win Without Popular Vote be Swan Song for Swing States?”. The piece goes on to offer some scholarly opinions on “the pros and cons of our current Electoral College system.” One of those ivy tower denizens cited in the ABC News article is Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Keyssar sees the electoral college — particularly the way it functions in modern presidential elections — to be a “deformed version” of what the founders intended.

Professor Keyssar’s remedy for the irreparable damage being done to our nation by the two-party duopoly controlling presidential politics is to scrap the electoral college and award the White House to the candidate winning the majority of the popular vote. "My own view is that a popular vote system would make the institutions in this country keep up with changes that have been going on in the social fabric of the country for 200 years," Keyssar tells ABC News.

ABC appears hopeful for the chaos that an electoral college collapse would cause when it recounts a bit of recent history of the effort to supplant the electoral college with a popular vote count:

There is an effort — Natonal Popular Vote — which has been ratified by eight states, to basically create a legal agreement among states to keep the electoral college, but award the votes proportionally instead of by state.

But it isn't a Constitutional amendment and there are concerns that a broad agreement by some states would violate the Constitution.

Because up until now, all of the states that have adopted the NPV bill have been Blue states — states that are generally assumed to lean towards the Democratic, rather than the Republican, candidate for President. And unless a Red state joins soon, it will become increasingly hard to debunk the (wrongheaded) fear that Red state folks have that the National Popular Vote bill is a Democratic scheme, rather than a democratic idea.

Keyssar’s comments and ABC’s commentary that the electoral college is outmoded and not “keep[ing] up with changes” in society, is very similar to a statement from a December 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece written by Jonathan Soros, son of globalist financier George Soros. In the article, Soros insists that the election of the President by the method established by the Constitution of 1787 is “antidemocratic by design.” “The Constitution is no longer in line with our expectations regarding the role of the people in selecting the President,” he said.

Paradoxically — almost certainly unintentionally — Keyssar and Soros are right, but for the wrong reasons. The prevailing spirit of the Constitution is antidemocratic and is so by the very deliberate and express design of the framers thereof.